Given that racists and slavers used the “natural physical strength” of black people to justify putting them on hard labor and some medics still think that blacks has higher resistance to pain, I wonder if when black athletes started to join mixed race sport teams, some racist would have used the same “biological advantage” argument that now transphobes use against trans athletes to claim it was “unfair” for black to compete against whites to justify segregation.
But American slavers quite literally bred black people. Yes, like animals. Hell, making it here on a slave ship could be called a form of breeding. Those ships were a perfect hell where only the strongest survived.
Jimmy was callous, out of place, racist, all that, but there was a solid grain of truth in there.
What they don’t tell you: a lot of the “breeding” (rape) of enslaved people wasn’t based in modern understanding of genetics, and instead was based on insane shit like ‘everyone from this ethnic group must be better at growing rice.’
While undoubtedly horrible, I wouldn’t expect the Middle Passage to be more of a selective force for a population than any other disaster (war, famine, plague, etc) where healthy, strong people have the highest chance of survival. Especially when you consider that the majority of Black Americans have at least some white ancestry, which would contribute as well to their athletic ability along with their black ancestry.
Ah!
Never looked at it that way! Still, I’d call the Atlantic crossing to be especially brutal. Given my druthers, I’d chance any of the four horseman over a ride in a transatlantic slave ship.
Something to think on, as well as:
Knew that one, it’s obvious to us Americans, but still, some good food for thought.
Slightly beside the topic, did you know that Barbados and some other islands in the West Indies were prized because their location was directly in the path of the prevailing winds/currents that brought ships from Africa? As one person put it, you could practically launch the ship from the port in Africa and do nothing and it would likely end up in Barbados